


that's just the way the story goes

by weatheredlaw



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Drift Bond, F/M, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 09:12:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatheredlaw/pseuds/weatheredlaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You are incapable of love, Miss Sofen. You and your partner are incapable of appropriate human emotion, and even though you are Drift compatible, you would be ineffective and unsympathetic heroes to the cause."</p>
            </blockquote>





	that's just the way the story goes

**Author's Note:**

> Not in any real order in the series, just me and my goofy brain doing weird stuff.

Karla didn't find out she and Lester were Drift compatible the way she should have -- facing one another down in the Kwoon, doing things by specific rules and regulations. It wasn't really how she worked. And maybe that should have been the big sign for her. That she wasn't going to do what she'd come to the academy to do.

But she found her copilot. Yeah, she did. She fucked his brains out, too. 

Sitting in the mess hall, Karla had seen him walk in, had met his eye without meaning to, and he'd zeroed in on her. He looked a little wild, almost like he didn't belong. A storm amid a calm sea of pilots, scientists and engineers, all trying to save the world.

Lester looked like he wanted to burn it all down. 

"How'd you get a boiled egg?" were his first words to her. Karla ate it slowly, smugly in front of him. His jaw clenched, a vein in his neck seemed to twitch. 

He looked like he wanted to devour her and Karla stared right back.

Later, after she thought she'd lost him, after Karla thought she might never see him again and wouldn't that be the saddest bit of it all -- he was waiting by her room, looking nervous, looking like he wanted to knock something over, topple a china cabinet just to hear it all go to pieces. She met him at the door, nose to nose, and let him in. 

He brought her over the edge a dozen times, and she kept him just close enough to it to make him crazy. Half-way through, she felt this _pull_ on one side of her brain, like someone was there. The look he gave her told her he felt the same thing and the words that came out of his mouth were the ones she was thinking.

"You're my copilot." 

Lester moaned after he said it, and came, filling the condom and jerking hard inside her, not wanting to finish just yet. Karla held him close, felt the twitch of muscles under her hands and she knew she couldn't let go. She knew she couldn't let this _feeling_ go. Her hands had been empty for so long and now they were full of this mad, wild thing of another human being who didn't look stable enough to make it through Ranger training, but obviously had. 

"Lester--" He kissed her, finally pulling out and getting rid of the condom. They stayed like that for hours, their mouths hot, tongues sliding over curves and into the spaces between them. She could feel the frantic, painful energy between them. It was alive. It felt more real than anything she'd felt in ages. Karla felt, for the first time in so long, that she could really do something.

And just as quickly as she'd gotten it, they took it away.

 

 

 

Now, sitting on the boat, watching the world piece itself together, she thinks it was a good thing they cut the two of them loose. Lots of people died, trying to close that Breach. And neither of them had to do it. Giving up your life for a cause -- just not her style. Not these days. And not for lack of trying either. The day she and Lester got into a Jaeger, a Jaeger called Phantom Hand, she thought this was it. They were going to walk into Hell together, and it would be okay, because they were right there next to each other in the Conn-Pod, hands brushing, minds welded together by memory and touch. 

The Marshall tore them out of their Jaeger so fast, so hard, they didn't have time to adjust. Lester kept saying what Karla was thinking, and she kept answering questions directed at him. Even when they were separated, it was non-stop. It was brutal, not being able to touch him, to be near him. Her therapist told her she was unwell, unstable. The Jaeger needed two pilots who did not exhibit the kind of apathy, the kind of harrowing behavior she and Lester seemed to.

"You are incapable of love, Miss Sofen. You and your partner are incapable of appropriate human emotion, and even though you are Drift compatible, you would be ineffective and unsympathetic heroes to the cause."

Karla spit in his face.

 

 

 

She loves him. The thing about the two of them, they don't have to say it. It's the only real emotion she might be capable of.

Lester likes to tell her, but only sometimes. Only when he's tired, just waking up in the morning, groggy from sleep, hung over on sex and gin. He kisses her slow, to wake them both up, and Karla puts her hands on either side of his face and thinks _I love you_. Lester says, "I love you." She isn't sure who's thoughts belong to whom this early in the morning, but the longer she spends with him, in their boat stolen from a tourist's harbor on their way out of Hong Kong, the more she knows.

It never needed to matter. Still doesn't. 

She makes breakfast, usually fish and poached eggs, some bread they start picking up, once the rationing laws get looser in some of the port cities. They spend a lot of time docked in San Francisco because the music is good and the Boneslum is cleaning up. 

"Fucking nouveau riche motherfuckers," Lester mutters, looking spitefully down at his cappuccino and scowling. "Fucking gentrifying assholes."

"Baby."

"I'm just _saying_ ," he mutters, but he orders a beet salad and a grapefruit spritzer all the same.

Karla blows him in the bathroom to make him feel a little more pedestrian. 

 

 

 

A year after the Breach is closed, they sell the boat and by a place by the beach, twenty minutes out of San Francisco. It's immediately an issue. Being on the water let them be away from everyone else, and they could go back to sea whenever they wanted. Now, even by the shore, Karla feels landlocked, and she doesn't have to do much reaching to know Lester sometimes feels the same.

They start doing what they can. He builds furniture with meticulous detail, and Karla collects shells. A certain shape, certain color. They fill jars lined up in front of a living room window. Sometimes she finds sea glass, and that goes into another set of jars, filtering sunlight in the kitchen, casting green and blue reflections on the hardwood floors. She gets a job as a waitress up the street and Lester starts fixing trucks in a shop not too far from her cafe. People come in, their classics a mess after years of being cooped up, waiting for the end of the world to come and go. 

At night, they Drift the only way they know how. He stills knows how to take care of her, even if they are complete disasters outside of bed. And Karla knows how to reciprocate. It's the way they are, the only way they know how to be. 

She never wanted to be a hero. Rejection was what she was made for, built for.

Until him. 

Rejected together, rejected for everything and nothing. She'd like Marshall Fury to see them now. She knows he wouldn't be impressed. She knows the two of them, together, are nothing to really be proud of.

But on their own time, in their own private world, their island away from everyone else -- they are fierce and proud and hardwired to exist this way. 

_I am part of you, I am with you, I am made of whatever you are made of, we were made like this so we could end up here._


End file.
